Have you noticed how chummy we are getting? There is no longer a polite waiting for acquaintance to develop before Mr Farnsbarns becomes Charlie, and John Doe is a universal Jack. Instant intimacy is what we have and no one does it more offensively than the politician being interviewed.
"Could you answer the question please, Dr Reid?"
"The point is, Eddie, that as Tony Blair has said ..."
They have been on evil little courses and hope to gain debating advantage by this little de haut en bas pre-emption. Mostly, though, instant intimacy is a two-way assumption of mutual comfort to which this pedantic formalist submits and does the auto-Fred bit.
There are, of course, echoes here. We didn't get organised into proper surnames until when - the 14th century? Better-informed pedants will write to explain. But around about then, William the Miller started to become William Miller and Peter the Shepherd, Peter Shepherd. It took time to formulate the middle-class reaction, witness Jane Austen for whose heroine, Elizabeth Bennett, her husband would, even after marriage, always be "Mr Darcy". Meanwhile, the author herself, being only a younger daughter, was confined to "Miss Jane Austen". Cressida, the elder, was alone entitled to be "Miss Austen". The solitary Christian name did, however, survive among inferiors, persons not quite thought to have identity: Henry who stood behind chairs, her ladyship's Betty, and those club servants all called "Charles".
The single Christian name also survived in the Church where they spoke formally of "Robert, our Bishop". Today, alas, it is probably "Bob, our Bish". Which brings us to another point, the relentless rise of the diminutive. The loss of ordinary self-respect among so many clergy desperate for the adolescent vote has lately produced, across the front of a church in Islington, a loud banner proclaiming, as best I can recall, "A DJ for Jesus and stompin', rockin' worship". So "Bishop Bob" it is, washed clean by demotic submersion of all dignity, presence or hope of being listened to. You have done the familiarity, my Lords, don't be surprised at the contempt.
Cloth ears in high places and atop swelling fortunes have ensured that orders of chivalry follow the prideless clergy. The fields of pomp are newly strewn with "Sir Chris", "Dame Suzy" and "Sir Bill", not to mention the plain wrong "Lord Roger" - or "Lord Rog" - for some nullity of a life peer annexing the honorific of a younger son in the higher reaches of the real, 16 quarterings thing.
However, the generation of our own diminutised Prime Minister might be shocked to find that the 20th-century precedent for all this mateyness is an organisation very keen on authority and proper respect, the Communist Party of Great Britain. Go back to the 1930s, when the political mainstream was manned by the tight-collared likes of Mr Winston Churchill, Sir Herbert Samuel and Mr Ernest Bevin and you will find, along with open-necked shirts, and proclaiming one-ness with the capital 'P' People, Harry Pollitt, Willy Gallacher, Johnny Campbell and Bert Rust! It was almost certainly "the Party" which started the daft wartime thing about "Joe" Stalin - not really one of life's Joes.
The trouble with diminutives is that they know no boundary. Natural and comfortable shortenings - Fred, Frank, Jack and Steve - are now followed by neological horrors like the dread z-formation. How long before we have "Jez, our Bishop"? And what about names never before shortened. The walls of self-parody have been breeched: I know a man called Ian whose office colleagues, to his discerning revulsion, call him "Ee".
Finally, if you want vision of the demotic future, however grave and grim-avized the victim, consider our next prime minister. The Friday's Evening Standard had a headline which spoke of "Gord". Perhaps, though, it's a mispronunciation.
